1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a display device equipped with a touch panel, the display device allowing input operations using a display surface of a display panel by disposing a touch panel on the display surface of the display panel accessible through an opening section of a device housing.
2. Related Art
As a display device equipped with a touch panel of this kind in the related art, there is cited what is described in JP-A-10-73805 (hereinafter referred to as “Patent Document 1”), for example. Patent Document 1 describes what is related to a liquid crystal display device equipped with a liquid crystal panel integrated with a touch panel. The liquid crystal device described in Patent Document 1 is characterized in that “in the liquid crystal display device having a liquid crystal display panel with a transparent touch panel stacked on the display surface side thereof housed in a case with a display window, the case is made support only the touch panel, and the back face of the liquid crystal display panel is made a predetermined length distant from the inside surface of the case.”
According to the liquid crystal display device having such a configuration described in Patent Document 1, an advantage that “the pressing force can be prevented from acting on the liquid crystal display panel in the floating state, and accordingly, the variation in display caused by the pressing force can be prevented from appearing in the liquid crystal display panel (see paragraph [0010])” is expected.
The touch panel provided to the liquid crystal display device described in Patent Document 1 is a so-called resistive-film touch panel having a pair of film substrates each provided with a transparent electrode on the surface facing each other and a spacer intervening between the pair of film substrates. The resistive-film touch panel is arranged so that the transparent electrode of the film substrate touches the transparent electrode of the film substrate in response to the film substrate being pressed, thus the position of the pressed area is detected to perform an input operation. FIG. 7 shows an example of the display device of the related art equipped with such a resistive-film touch panel.
The display device 100 shown in FIG. 7 is composed of a device chassis 101 provided with an opening section 101a, a display panel 102 housed inside the device chassis 101 and having a display surface accessible through the opening section 101a, a touch panel 103 disposed in the display surface of the display panel, a seal member 104 intervening between the touch panel 103 and the device chassis 101, and so on. Further, the touch panel 103, which is of the resistive-film, is composed of an upper substrate 103a and a lower substrate 103b each provided with a transparent conductive film (corresponding to the transparent electrode of the touch panel according to Patent Document 1) on the surface thereof facing each other, bar-like cushion members 103c disposed between the peripheries of the upper substrate 103a and the lower substrate 103b, and so on.
In such a touch panel 103, a pressing operation performed on a peripheral area X of the cushion member 103c will cause strong force applied on the upper substrate 103a taking a corner of the cushion member 103c as the fulcrum. In this case, since the transparent conductive film provided to the upper substrate 103a is brittle in nature, if the distance from the point on which the pressing operation is performed to the corner of the cushion member 103c is short, the transparent conductive film might be broken. Therefore, in the display device 100 of the related art, by covering the area X with the rim of the opening section 101a of the device chassis 101, the pressing operation on the area X has been prevented.
However, in the display device having such a configuration, since the area X, which might be broken by the pressing operation thereon is covered with the rim of the opening section 101a of the device chassis 101, a step has been caused between the surface of the device main body 101 and the surface of the touch panel 103. Therefore, the display device easily gets dirty with foreign particles such as dust accumulated in the step section between the device chassis 101 and the touch panel 103, resulting in problems of a cumbersome work for removing the dirt and of a low visual quality of the appearance thereof, from the view point of design.